Ensuring security is a major challenge to most private and public facilities. More and more facilities use heightened security procedures to monitor and inspect vehicles passing through a designated location. Systems that provide automatic vehicle identification and classification are no longer sufficient to provide the needed security. Since contraband and explosives are often hidden in a vehicle's undercarriage, under vehicle surveillance systems are in increasing demand, especially at military installations, prisons, airports, seaports, or other public facilities.
Most existing under vehicle surveillance systems use a central personal computer (PC) to control cameras and manage the capturing and displaying of images. With this current design, extensive and complex cable connections are involved. Other systems use multiple cameras similar to a digital video system. However, such a multi-camera system is slow and difficult to operate. Still other systems use area line scan cameras, such as a color tri-linear charge-coupled device (CCD), to capture composite images of a vehicle's undercarriage and combine the multiple images to display a complete undercarriage image. However, the generated image typically has motion color skew that is undesirable.